Hamlet at Riverside studio review: Eddie Izzard's Shakespeare is an act of colossal vanity and hubris

I’ve seen a musical about pornographic wallpaper, and a play that a lone producer decided to perform when his cast failed to turn up. Those were, arguably, worse ideas than this solo tragedy from Eddie Izzard.

Still, this one-person Hamlet is an act of colossal vanity and hubris, hung on the skimpiest artistic justification. It’s worse than Izzard’s awful solo Great Expectations last year, which at least had a framing first-person narrative.

Here, Izzard musters barely any characterisation, emotion or grandeur as she canters through barely-differentiated characters in a script drastically edited by her older brother Mark, and sketchily directed by Selina Cadell.

Izzard goes by Suzy now, but still uses Eddie professionally (and doesn’t mind male pronouns) as that was her name and assigned gender when she started out as a street performer, and then parlayed a prodigious talent for standup into a hit-and-miss acting career.

Now 62, and with little classical experience, this clown wasn’t going to get to play Hamlet unless she did it herself. So she did, and it’s a disaster that diminishes both play and performer. I say that as a fan of Izzard’s for over three decades, and someone who thinks Shakespeare can withstand pretty much anything that’s thrown at him.

Izzard appears on the white-box stage in a waisted jacket, vinyl trousers and boots, a peroxide crop, crimson lipstick and nails, and heavy eye-makeup. She could be running the Queen Vic. But she launches into the battlement scene of Hamlet, shivering at the imaginary cold, drawing an imaginary sword. It’s risible.

The later scenes of the play-within-a-play and the duel, with a lone Izzard struggling to establish multiple points of focus, are so embarrassing I almost cringed up my own fundament.

For female characters she adopts a fluting voice and wafts at her cleavage; for Claudius and old Hamlet she booms. Her crimson-tipped hands become a yapping Rosencranz and Guildenstern: it’s faintly obscene, like watching naked Muppets. For Polonius she has a limp. Hamlet himself is a boor, or a blank. You can see the relief with which Izzard relaxes into comic phrasing and froggy grimaces for the funnier lines or characters.

Of the soliloquies, “To be or not to be” is the only one not butchered. The text is mostly judiciously edited but difficult words like “mobled” or “hectic” are excised and “git”, “bonce” and “bugger” are added.

Why? That’s the question you ask yourself throughout. When Ian McKellen did his age-blind Hamlet, or Phyllida Lloyd her all-female Shakespeare trilogy, or even when Robert Lepage did his wrong-headed solo Hamlet adaptation, Elsinore, there was a clear artistic vision in play.

Izzard suggests her start in street theatre and comedy gives her a rapport with an audience close to the strolling players of Shakespeare’s day. Well, that’s “players”, plural, and the theory wasn’t borne out by the muted reactions on opening night. All I saw was ego. And again, I’m saying that as an admirer.

Riverside Studio, to June 30; eddieizzardhamlet.com